"I didn't think he brought any honor to the game," Heller says. "I consider myself an ethical player, and I wasn't comfortable [playing with him]."

Bridge was challenging, but, at college, success seemed to come easily. Cole made the dean's list, which requires a B+ average or better, all eight semesters he was there. He published a 34-page book on human rights in Pakistan. In his spare time, he worked on his language skills. Friends say he speaks fluent French, German, Italian and Spanish and that he has a working knowledge of Chinese.

"He is one of the brightest people I've ever met," says Waxenberg, who has known Cole since high school and is an assistant vice president for the investment bank Kidder, Peabody and Co. "His verbal skills and his math skills are first-rate across the board. We're talking about a guy who could do anything he wanted to."

"He could do my job in two days," Waxenberg adds. "He'd just be bored with it."

Bridge wasn't boring, and Cole had natural talent for the game.

But, bridge players say, he was never as good as he thought he was.

"He was a peppy young kid with a chip on his shoulder," says Arjun Ray a computer consultant and professional bridge player who played with Cole. "He vastly overrated his skills."

In fact, Cole exaggerated not only his skills but also his accomplishments in bridge. In the entry next to his picture in the 1984 Columbia yearbook, Cole claims to have won "6 National Bridge Championships; 4 World Championship."

The entry is fiction.

Cole's name does not appear on the American Contract Bridge League's official lists of champions for any of the 13 national bridge events. In a 1991 application for entry into the Bridge Encyclopedia, Cole himself acknowledged that he had no world championships and no national championships (aside from a 1990 collegiate title won while he was a graduate student member of the Harvard Bridge Club).

Bridge: Cole Plays, Write on the Game

After graduating from Columbia, Cole took a year off to play bridge professionally. In 1985, he began his graduate studies at Harvard, but remained active in the bridge community.

Having attained the rank of life master--a designation held by about a quarter of the American Contract Bridge League's 180,000 members--be won an important intercollegiate bridge title in 1990 (graduate students are eligible for intercollegiate competitions). In 1991, Cole published a 144-page books Fishheads, in which he described, among other things, the Fishhead Coup.

During the years after college, Cole became well-known among the country's top bridge players--though not always for winning performances.

Bobby Wolf, the president of the World Bridge Federation, has long harbored, ill feelings toward Cole. He says Cole was not an ethical bridge player.